Floor Manager’s Cue
CEE
“Knowledge is not wisdom!”, Buscaglia tells us. “Learning alone, is not wisdom!”
No. And, it doesn’t make for helping old ladies across the street, either. This is an edgy Time. It’s a Bill Hicks world. Humans believe in entitlement. Especially the ones who claim they don’t. They require a reason to give a shit, beyond some wheeze of “be nice to others”. If you give this one an “ism” to nod to or another a hero to admire or pay that one off really well, maybe you’ve snack machined yourself “compassion” or other secondary-emotional goodies. The difference between a narcissist like me and card-carrying humanists being, my sort are able, Arthur Dent to the ground, to believe our needs exclusive of convention. High-minded Others (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., comes to mind) sit and stew, preach and snipe, wringing hands, jigging about, puzzling why human persons don’t “do the right thing”.
Duh. They’re human persons. Scratch at one with a Jefferson nickel, sometime. In less than a minute, you’ll have gotten down to stygian, obsidian black. Man is not born good, Kilgore, so “good”, he never becomes—but, Man is awfully good at claiming goodness, the trouble with this line being, Truth is true because it’s TRUE, not because you can pass a polygraph to that effect.
To this end, Man cannot create goodness, nor can he build goodness, nor extract it nor shape it nor legislate it. At most, Man can, via his punitive nature, establish penalties. So, we can throw out Eden, Shangri-La and Plato’s Republic, because they’re only going to be as Utopian as Sheriff Joe can make them. Globalize that, underscored by wars going back to Isaac vs. Ishmael, then throw in a random Marx or Nietzsche. Now, sit there with your constipated expression, because, hey!, you’re genteel, dammitt, and Humans just aren’t “doing the right thing”!
Now, see yourself as no longer young, that never will you be, not ever, ever again...and a lot of the other genteel people are dead, dying or asking, “Time for my cookie?”...and the ones they—and you—taught compassion, are coming off strongly as the boys who didn’t vote for Ralph in Lord of the Flies. As you’re able to see, no one gives a shit about “right” or “compassion” or “love” or “giving”, not their fellowmen nor their basic needs, nor their crops on FaceSpace, either. They SAY it if cornered, or mantra-it all day long...but, Life’s really a big trough, where the meal prayer is, “I got mine, to Hell with you!” Only you and those with the most constipated expressions, are offended by this, for more than a moment.
Your youth, is gone; that beautiful flesh against flesh, like the beginning of For Keeps, has turned into Forrest Gump sitting silent, just before he goes on his running spree. Your world is gone; at best Others humor you, because, well... your youth is gone. And your youth and your world, captured in photos, captured in books, may as well be a weird tale about the oceans freezing solid.
You’ve lived the only decent part of human existence away into the mists of Time. And...OMG. No one cares. Though, everyone insists they care. Many, try to force everyone else to care about what they themselves claim to care about. And everyone’s claiming a different lie. And everyone’s hitting everyone else across the face with it. Hard. Know why? This Just In: “Human”, is precisely the opposite of what you always wished to believe.
This chapbook, is one filled with consumed knowledge from those eager. It is a jesting about intellectual jousting, brought to us each week in a Once Upon a Time, by a once upon a company named General Electric. My hometown’s college, was on this program for five consecutive weeks, October/November of 1969. They were never defeated. Reason #3422, Why I’m Smug.
CEE, on assignment with the Light Brigade at Balaclava,
Sevastopol, Russia, October 25th, 1854
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